Philippe Aghion is very familiar with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the moment when the HAL 9000 computer takes control of the spaceship. But the economist has little interest in science fiction. Since September 19, he has been co-chairing the committee of experts on artificial intelligence (AI), launched by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, whose mission is to present "concrete proposals" for adapting France's "national strategy" within the next six months. While the inter-ministerial committee is tasked with exploring the potential effects of this new technology, as fascinating as it is frightening, on employment, inequality and happiness at work, the Collège de France professor is approaching his subject with "Churchillian optimism," he said.
Aware of the dangers of AI, the former Harvard professor imagines, in six months, showing above all the extent of the benefits of this technology and reducing its anxiety-provoking potential. "You're less afraid of something when you know more about it," he told Le Monde, assuring that he hadn't heard Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right Rassemblement national (RN) party, speak on the subject in the spring.
The 28-year-old's keen interest in AI, which he describes as "the most dizzying challenge of our century," has nonetheless baffled the government. "In the knowledge economy, mankind is going to have the power of the gods in his hands: to colonize the cosmos, to carry out embryonic selection, to regulate genetics. France must regulate and innovate," pleaded Marine Le Pen's protégé on French television on April 2.
Until now, French President Emmanuel Macron's supporters were alone, or almost alone, in taking political hold of this subject. Back in 2017, Macron, champion of the "start-up nation," commissioned mathematician Cédric Villani to produce a report on this technology likely to provoke a shock comparable to the invention of the printing press or the Internet. At the time, France, like Europe, had been left behind by the digital giants. It is non-existent in the world of social media, and absent from the smartphone and search engine markets. The country had to get behind the Californian geeks and the Chinese brains to quickly bring out champions of artificial intelligence on French soil, with a great deal of public money: €1.5 billion was put on the table.
Six years later, the arrival of ChatGPT, software capable of sustaining a lightning-fast online conversation, propelled AI into the public arena, carrying with it its share of theories about machines overtaking man. The call for a "pause" in AI development, signed in March by billionaire Elon Musk and hundreds of experts, underlining "major risks for humanity," has only fueled these fears.
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